The peoblem is funding as allways. Both of them are similar and both of them are very expensive. Especially if you look at the USA, what I'm guessing this post if referencing. Your network is so unbelievably bad it takes a lot of muny to build up anything. And even if you had intercity routes, you still need public transit in those cities to get there. Otherwise people have to drive there by car and if there already in the car they can just drive the whole way. And you would need huge parking spaces. Parking spaces (especially in the USA) are a big problem. The point of a train station is to be in the middle of the city. So directly between shops and stuff like that. Huge ass parking spaces don't allow that, because you first have to walk some time to get to some "civilization"

(Yea sorry for the rant. Just can't believe how fucked up the USA is regarding car dependency)

[–] Johanno@lemmy.fmhy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

Just take the fundings that go into roads and take half of them into rails.

Then advocate to use military budget to build rails since they need it to move tanks and stuff.

[–] returnzero@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Fortunately local public transit would most likely come out of city budgets, while high speed rail would be state/federal. We absolutely could (and should) do both at the same time.

You know, if we weren't spending the money on that 7th highway lane that will surely fix traffic this time, or the 200th empty asphalt field that's used only 5% of the time but we need to keep around on the off chance that the entire town gets the urge to go grocery shopping at the same time.